The worry is that all the interviews with which Clarke is now plagued will limit his time for his most important work . . . haranguing commentators about their indolence and stupidity. I had a taste of it a few weeks ago when he responded to a robust piece with a 450-word letter.

That letter was to prove but an amuse bouche for the banquet to follow. Readers may recall that the 'vidi-printer' on poor, condemned old Grandstand, when faced with an outlandish-looking score, would spell out the figure . . . "Chelsea 0 Tottenham Hotspur 11 (ELEVEN)" . . . lest anyone assumed it was a mistake.

Let me remind you, then, that Clarke's letter rebutting another columnist on the matter of civil liberties ran to no less than 14 (FOURTEEN) pages. On the eve of the revelation that hundreds of foreign cons have vanished within our borders, the man responsible carved from his languid schedule at least four or five hours to construct this quasi-legalistic, pitifully spurious hotch-potch of self-justificatory drivel.

It was said of Bill Clinton that one of his gifts was the ability to compartmentalise . . .

to separate the very different crises facing him and deal with them individually. Britain's leaders, lacking Clinton's powers of concentration, prefer to share out the problems, so that while one ( jug ears) deals with a specific catastrophe, another (Patricia Hewitt) is publicly humbled by a political nightmare, and a third (bless him) humiliated by a frankly hilarious tale of sexual infidelity.

The problem with this philosophy of public humiliation for the many, not the few, is that it can be too much to take in at once. On its own, the Clarke fiasco stretches credibility close to snapping point.

In conjunction with the vision of Hewitt being welcomed by the nurses as Captain Hook is greeted by eight-year-olds at a panto, and those front-page snaps of John Prescott pawing his middle-aged Lewinskyf it's a political version of Stendhal Syndrome, which causes tourists in Florence to faint when their aesthetic sensibilities are overloaded by all that incredible beauty. You simply cannot take it all in.

Once you've been hauled off the floor, however, and been given a cup of sweet tea laced with Scotch, you are struck by the unfairness of the already hackneyed comparison between the sense of fin de siecle atrophy occasioned by Triple Whammy Wednesday and the end of the Major era. Truly, Sir John doesn't deserve that.

The dog days of Major was just about where the government was six months ago, with John Reid going on Today every minute to do his cleverer and more menacing version of Brian Mawhinney, and Hewitt chipping in her impression of Mrs Bottomley by parroting statistics no one believes with all the breathy condescension of a third-rate actress on Jackanory in 1957.

Now it is infinitely worse.

To compare the Tory sleaze of which Blair made so much in 1997 with the loans-for-honours scandal is equating the theft of a Curly Wurly from a sweet shop to the £50m Tonbridge heist. The cash-forquestions Tories were fantastically obscure backbenchers, and Neil Hamilton merely a better known irrelevance . . . light years from a serving PM awaiting a call from the Yard about his role as Brains in a gang of peerage-floggers.

Politically, meanwhile, John Major's difficulties were unavoidable. With a barely existent parliamentary majority and a party suffering an ideological schism over Europe, the great issue of the time, history may even one day praise him for holding it together as long as he did.

Blair has no ideological excuse for the chaos that engulfs him. With him, all the real damage comes from doubts about his personal honesty and the probity and competence of his closest allies.

With Prescott, Hewitt and Clarke playing the Three Stooges last week, and adding their names to the list of thoroughly degraded close allies (Campbell, Mandelson, Milburn, Byers, Blunkett and Jowell), he has not a single significant supporter left who isn't a national laughing stock.

Nothing but chutzpah is keeping him upright now.

When he smiles at all, it is the bruised grin of the badly hurt boxer trying to disguise the fact that one well-timed punch will put out his lights. And still, from Gordon Brown, the silence is deafening. How much longer even he can wait in vain for the incoming towel is anyone's guess, but before too much longer the suspicion that he refuses to strike through cowardice rather than love of party will harden and start to weaken the cabinet's only strong figure. What is needed is a good, quick, clean mercy killing.